denied at St Malo; the reports of the French Admiralty were examined and indicated the substantial accuracy of the poem.  On one point Browning erred; it was not a day’s holiday to be spent with his wife “la Belle Aurore” which the Breton sailor petitioned for as the reward of his service, but a “conge absolu,” the holiday of a life-time.  In acknowledging his error to Dr Furnivall, and adding an explanation of its cause, he dismissed the subject with the word, “Truth above all things; so treat the matter as you please."[107]

For the purposes of holiday-making the resources of the northern French coast, with which Browning’s ballad of the Croisickese pilot is associated, were, says Mrs Orr, becoming exhausted.  Yet some rest and refreshment after the heavy tax upon his strength made by a London season with its various claims were essential to his well-being.  His passion for music would not permit him during his residence in town to be absent from a single important concert; the extraordinary range of his acquaintance with the works of great and even of obscure composers was attested by Halle.  In his sonnet of 1884, inscribed in the Album to Mr Arthur Chappell, The Founder of the Feast, a poem not included in any edition of his works, he recalls these evenings of delight: 

      Sense has received the utmost Nature grants,
    My cup was filled with rapture to the brim,
      When, night by night—­ah, memory, how it haunts!—­
      Music was poured by perfect ministrants,
    By Halle, Schumann, Piatti, Joachim.

Long since in Florence he had become acquainted with Miss Egerton-Smith, who loved music like himself, and was now often his companion at public performances in London.  She was wealthy, and with too little confidence in her power to win the regard of others, she lived apart from the great world.  In 1872 Browning lost the warm-hearted and faithful friend who had given him such prompt, womanly help in his worst days of grief—­Miss Blagden.  Her place in his memory remained her own.  Miss Egerton-Smith might seem to others wanting in strength of feeling and cordiality of manner.  Browning knew the sensitiveness of her nature, which responded to the touch of affection, and he could not fail to discover her true self, veiled though it was by a superficial reserve.  And as he knew her, so he wrote of her in the opening of his La Saisiaz: 

    You supposed that few or none had known and loved you in the world: 
    May be! flower that’s full-blown tempts the butterfly, not flower that’s furled. 
    But more learned sense unlocked you, loosed the sheath and let expand
    Bud to bell and out-spread flower-shape at the least warm touch of hand
    —­Maybe throb of heart, beneath which,—­quickening farther than it knew,—­
    Treasure oft was disembosomed, scent all strange and unguessed hue. 
    Disembosomed, re-embosomed,—­must one memory suffice,
    Prove I knew an Alpine rose which all beside named Edelweiss?